nothin Gogol Bordello Shatters Borders At College… | New Haven Independent

Gogol Bordello Shatters Borders At College Street Music Hall

Noah Kim photo

Gogol Bordello, the “Gypsy punks.”

Immigrant pride filled the College Street Music Hall Tuesday night as self-proclaimed gypsy punks” Gogol Bordello played a New Haven on its 20th anniversary tour.

During a chaotic, exuberant, three-hour concert, Gogol Bordello and openers the Nu Folk Rebel Alliance dedicated songs to Connecticut immigrants and called out President Donald Trump for his recent attempts to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Pedro Erazo of Gogol Bordello and the Nu Folk Rebel Alliance.

Where we live in this world, there are no borders and no walls!” shouted Pedro El Criollito” Erazo, a member of both bands.

Gogol Bordello’s second song of the night was the swaggering, fiddle-heavy anthem, Immigrant Punk,” which goes:

Upon arriving to the melting pot
I get penciled in as a goddamn white!
Now that I am categorized
Officer gets me naturalized!

The political dimensions of the concert could not have been more appropriate. Since its start in 1999, Gogol Bordello has pioneered a truly cosmopolitan approach to art, mashing a wide variety of musical traditions into a captivating and original paste.

In many ways, the band’s music resembles mad chemistry. The group takes the structures of Romani folk music and stirs in punk guitar, reggae beats, drums and fiddles to make some astonishing songs. There’s no other band in the world quite like it.

Eugene Hütz, lead singer of Gogol Bordello.

Despite (or because of) its eclectic and eccentric style, the band has gathered a substantial amount of critical acclaim. Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock critics,” once declared Gogol Bordello the most visionary band in the world.” Both he and Rolling Stone magazine went on to list Super Taranta!”, the band’s fourth record, as one of the best albums of the 2000s. Over the years, the band has also accumulated a reverential fanbase.

How many times have you seen them?” one woman behind me asked another as we waited for the concert to begin.

Five — no, six,” she replied.

A large part of Gogol Bordello’s appeal comes from the band’s uber-charismatic lead singer, Eugene Hütz, who has led a life as wild and storied as his songs. Of Russian, Ukranian, and Roma descent, Hütz fled his hometown with his family after the Chernobyl meltdown. In the 1990s, he migrated to the States as a political refugee through a resettlement program, eventually becoming a fixture of the bohemian communities on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he started the band that eventually became Gogol Bordello.

During Tuesday night’s New Haven performance, he was a frantic, sweaty presence, sauntering around the stage like a pirate, chugging wine straight from the bottle and stage-diving despite the evident horror of the bouncers as they struggled to reign in the enthusiastic crowd. He deserves to be on the short list for most magnetic frontman working today.

There’s something delightfully campy about Gogol Bordello’s musical style, from the witty, self-conscious lyrics (“Now you teach me how to rhyme, alcohol/ Just don’t stab me in the back with cortisol”) to the highfalutin’ philosophical allusions (“I know it all from Diogenes to the Foucault”) to the audacious, elaborate costumes. (In 2008, Hütz was cited as an inspiration for a Gucci menswear show in Milan.) During a period of solemn and self-serious musicianship, the band revels in its absurdities.

Over the course of the night, the band ran through music from it seven-album discography, finishing with two of their most popular songs: Start Wearing Purple” and Wonderlust King.”

After a raucous, five-minute ovation, the punks reemerged to play two more songs, concluding (for real) on Undestructible” from Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike,” the band’s most overtly political album. During the encore, one of the audience members passed a self-painted portrait of Hütz up to the stage, which the musician graciously signed.

Eugene Hütz.

Along with a comment: Twenty years in motherfucking show business.”

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